Tuesday, 29 November 2011

The exhibition held at the Royal College of Physicians is small and limited but to its credit does offer a great insight into the attitude of the country’s leading medical profession to the English Civil War.

At the outbreak of war members of the RCP were like many in the country heavily split in their allegiance. It is true that “In the 17th century the College of Physicians was led by a small group of powerful men who held widely differing religious and political opinions”. Certainly one of the most famous members of the college was the Royalist physician William Harvey who was described as "a man of lowest stature, round faced; his eyes small, round, very black and full of spirit; his hair as black as a raven and curling"

Harvey was not only responsible for looking after the King's medical requirements but made a significant contribution to the development of medicine by showing how blood circulated around the body. He said of his discovery “I found the task so truly arduous... that I was almost tempted to think... that the movement of the heart was only to be comprehended by God. For I could neither rightly perceive at first when the systole and when the diastole took place because of the rapidity of the movement..."

While Harvey took no time in declaring his allegiance to the crown, it could be said that other RCP members took a longer term attitude to navigate “their way through the conflict, pragmatically switching sides” some it would seem at the drop of a scalpel.

The exhibition has a well put together selection of audio readings concentrating on different parts of the civil war. One such reading comes from “a true copy of the high court of justice for the tryal of Charles published London `1684

According to the exhibition notes, this was “Published after the restoration to the throne of Charles II, this pro-Royalist work includes a transcription of Charles I’s trial and execution. There is also an appendix which provides 'An alphabetical catalogue of the members of the execrable pretended high court of justice…'

The exhibition notes describe the picture left as an “allegorical frontispiece is unambiguous in overall tone. Devil-like figures have commandeered a carriage, taking the crown and 'three nations' hostage, leaving liberty in the balance. Sheep and doves are attacked behind it, and the beheaded King Charles is crushed beneath its wheels. An accompanying explanatory verse was still deemed necessary, making reference to 'wounded justice' and a 'murder'd monarch'.

In one memorable exchange, the Clerk of the Court read “Charles Stuart, King of England, you have been accused on behalf of the people of England, of high treason, and other crimes, the court have determined that you ought to answer the same.To this the King replied “I will answer the same as soon as I know by what authority you do this”. Stubborn to the end the Kings last words on the scaffold were “I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown, where no disturbances can be.”

Perhaps one of the major weaknesses of the exhibition is its failure to go into any detail as regards the significant dissension towards the monarchy after all it puts this quote as a subheading of the exhibition ‘...when dissolution and idleness had put an end to good manners), some seditious ‘tribunes’ of the people and ill-conditioned scoundrels ... had defiled all things ... the Phoenix ... rose at last ...’ but fails to explain its meaning.

According to William Birken there was quite a tradition of dissension amongst men of medicine. According to Birken “In England, medicine has always been something of a refuge for individuals whose lives have been dislocated by religious and political strife. This was particularly true in the seventeenth century when changes in Church and State were occurring at a blinding speed. In his book The experience of defeat, Christopher Hill has described the erratic careers of some radical clergy and intellectuals who studied and practised medicine in times of dislocation. A list pulled together from Hill's book would include: John Pordage, Samuel Pordage, Henry Stubbe, John Webster, John Rogers, Abiezer Coppe, William Walwyn and Marchamont Nedham.1 Medicine as a practical option for a lost career, or to supplement and subsidize uncertain jobs, can also be found among Royalists and Anglicans when their lives were similarly disrupted during the Interregnum.

He goes on “among these were the brilliant Vaughan twins, Thomas, the Hermetic philosopher, and Henry, the metaphysical poet and clergyman; the poet, Abraham Cowley; and the mercurial Nedham, who was dislocated both as a Republican and as a royalist. The Anglicans Ralph Bathurst and Mathew Robinson were forced to abandon their clerical careers temporarily for medicine, only to return to the Church when times were more propitious”.

The exhibition is a rare glimpse into the treasure trove of material held by the RCP which in many cases have rarely been seen in public. So anyone finding themselves in London for a bit of Christmas shopping could do worse than going along to see it.

The Exhibition is held at the RCP Mon-Fri 9am-5pm until 15th March 2012

2. A True copy of the journal of the High Court of Justice for the tryal of K. Charles I as it was read in the House of Commons and attested under the hand of Phelps, clerk to that infamous court / taken by J. Nalson Jan. 4, 1683 : Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan, Digital Library Production Service

3. The Dissenting Tradition in English Medicine of the 17th and 18th Century William Birken Medical History 1995

4. The RCP of London and its Support of the Parliamentary Cause in the English civil War William Birken Journal of British Studies Vol 23 No 1 1983

Saturday, 19 November 2011

While I cannot say I follow your articles for History
Today on a regular basis but when an article catches my eye I tend to read it.
One such article was called Trotsky Offered Asylum. As the title of your column
suggests you write about events from the near or distance past.

If this particular article was nothing more than a
straight factual account of Leon Trotsky’s exile from the former Soviet Union I
would have had nothing to complain about but it was not. I am sorry to say your
article was a little dark and had a strong hint of a very conservative bias to
it to say the least.

My first complaint is that while you mention the struggle
between Trotsky and Stalin for students and people coming to this subject for
the first time you would not garner from your article that this was little more
than just a personality clash that Trotsky lost.

The life and death struggle was deeply political and to
no small extent decided the course of the 20th century and not for the better.
In fact mankind paid a very heavy price for Trotsky’s “fall” from power and
subsequent murder.

What I am trying to say that your article does not mention a
single political difference between Trotsky and Stalin. I admit you have a lack
of space but your article would have been strengthened by at least a cursory
examination over the controversy over Stalin’s theory of building socialism in
a single country versus Trotsky’s insistence on global revolution.

This aside there are other things in the article that I
would like to address. One of your turn of phrase left me a little cold and to
say the least was a little sinister. To describe Trotsky’s murderer as a
“charming Spanish Communist painter “is a little ridiculous.

He was a murderer
who pursued Trotsky and under Stalin’s personal order caved his skull with an
ice pick, perhaps you could explain what was charming about this.

While we are on the subject of Trotsky’s murder to
describe the act of murder as a “stab” of an ice pick is just plain bizarre.
Trotsky’s skull was caved in why you downplay this horrendous assassination.

My last point is that while it is difficult for a
historian to come out of their comfort zone and write on a subject they know
little about I must take exception to your description of Robert Service as
“Trotsky’s biographer”, given Service’s very right wing biography which is
strewn with major errors it is simply not true. If readers new to the subject
of Trotsky's life would like to view a more balance view then they should look
no further that Isaac Deutcher’s three volume trilogy. The compliment you pay
Service is not deserved.

2. Trotsky:
A Biography by Robert Service; In
Defence of Leon Trotsky by David North
Review by: By Bertrand M. Patenaude The American Historical Review Vol. 116, No. 3, June 2011 URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/ahr.116.3.900

Saturday, 5 November 2011

Hill's essay was first
published in Three British Revolutions, 1641, 1688, 1776 Ed J A Pocock
(Princeton U.P 1980) and contains within it a change in Hill’s 1940s position
on the English bourgeois revolution. Some historians both hostile and friendly
to Hill have seen this essay as Hill repudiating his previous estimation of the
bourgeois revolution. I do not agree with this supposition. In fact, the older
Hill got, the more he understood the complex problem associated with an
explanation of the transformation of Britain from a feudal society into a
capitalist one.Hill begins this essay with
a defence of his method and integrity.

Throughout his career Hill was accused
of being dogmatic, a “Rolodex” historian and only using sources that fitted in
with his Marxist assumptions. My own
understanding of Hill is that while he was a Marxist, he was none of the above.
He was an excellent historian, and like all historians, he was always revising
his understanding of the English revolution.
This attitude is best summed up by this quote from Hill, “The historian should not stay
on the surface of events; his or her interest should not be limited to State
Papers, Acts and Ordinances, decisions of judges and local magistrates... He or
she should listen--carefully and critically--to ballads, plays, pamphlets,
newspapers, tracts...to every source that
can help him or her to get the feel of how people lived and in what ways their
sensitivity differed from ours... The
historian must listen to alchemists and astrologers no less than to bishops, to
demands of London crowds; and he or she must try to understand the motivation
of rioters, whether they are labelled anti-Catholic or anti-enclosure rioters
or simply food rioters”. The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century
Revolution (London, 1993), pp436-437.

The central theme of this essay
as the title suggests, was there was there a bourgeois revolution? Hill in this
article observed that it was tough to offer a precise definition of bourgeois
revolution. 'The Marxist conception of a bourgeois revolution, which I find the
most helpful model for understanding the English Revolution,' he wrote, 'does
not mean a revolution made by the bourgeoisie'. There was no self-conscious
bourgeoisie which planned and willed the revolution. But the English Revolution
was a bourgeois revolution because of its outcome, though glimpsed by few of
its participants, 'was the establishment of conditions far more favourable to
the development of capitalism than those which prevailed before 1640'. 'A
Bourgeois Revolution?’ op cit, pp110, 111, 115, 134.

Hill’s original essay
tackling the bourgeois revolution was written in 1940. The article stands on
its own merit but you feel that Hill was not entirely satisfied with what he
wrote and his intention was to revise it and take the subject matter further
after all he did write it while he still serving in the army and as he said it was the work of “a very angry young man, believing he was going
to be killed in a world war.”

The 1980 essay is a
confirmation that in later life Hill never repudiated his previous position he
attempted to reformulate specific
thoughts. In 1967 he wrote Reformation to Industrial Revolution (1967), while
still retaining the idea that it was a bourgeois revolution he sought to give
the term a more precise approximation. He
intimated that the revolution was not as clear-cut
as he had thought and neither was a chemically pure as had been written on.
After the entire bourgeoisie in its various forms did fight on both sides. But
he is clear on the fact that the revolution made a path for further and rapid
capitalist expansion.

With a few reservations, I
think Hill is correct when he says that the 1640 “bourgeois revolution” was not
“consciously willed by the bourgeoisie”. This is not to say that the revolution
did not have its thinkers or that philosophy played no part in the revolution.
At the heart of Hill’s position is that he believed that the actions of the
leading figures of the revolution were to some considerable
extent empirical.

Having said that” he was
sensitive enough to his historical sources to detect the social currents that
brought people of diverse social backgrounds into struggle against the king and
well-grounded enough in history to identify new and revolutionary ideas in the
curious and archaic guise in which they appeared—as the ideologists of the
revolution ransacked the Bible and half-understood
historical precedent for some kind of theory to explain what they were doing”.
"These the times ... this the man": an appraisal of historian
Christopher Hill by Ann Talbot 25 March 2003.

Hill’s work was apparently groundbreaking
he defined the mid-seventeenth century crisis as a revolution. His definition
of the revolution that the rule of one class was replaced by the rule of
another still stands the test of time despite a ferocious attack by the
revisionists.

As Ann
Talbot said “Most of all, he was sufficiently astute to realise that when the
people execute their king after a solemn trial and much deliberation, it is not
the result of a misunderstanding but has a profound revolutionary significance
entailing a complete break with the feudal past. Although the
monarchy was later restored and the triumphant bourgeoisie was soon eager to
pretend that the whole thing had been a ghastly mistake, no monarch sat quickly
on the throne after that event until quite late in Victoria’s reign”.

While Hill maintained that
the bourgeoisie was barely conscious of its actions his writing imbues a
recognition that revolutions are not solely made by a tiny elite. In the case
of the 1640 revolution, the mass of the population
was involved and that a change in the
consciousness of that mass of people did change. This change was in distorted
form reflected in the writings of the Levellers.

A considerable part of
Hill’s essay concerned itself with the Land question. His emphasis examining
economic changes which contributed to the English revolution are an anathema to most modern day historians. According to Hill in his 1940 essay,“The northern and western
parts of England remained relatively untouched by the new commercial spirit
radiating from London and the ports; but in the south and east many landowners
were beginning to exploit their estates in a new way. Both in the Middle Ages
and in the seventeenth century the first importance of an estate was that it
supplied a land owner (through his control over the labour of others) with the
means of livelihood. But over and above this, the large estates had in the
Middle Ages maintained with their surplus agricultural produce a body of
retainers who would on occasion act as soldiers, and so were the basis of the
political power of the feudal lords. Now, with the development of the
capitalist mode of production within the structure of feudalism, many
landowners began either to market that portion of the produce of their estates
which was not consumed by their families, or to lease their lands to a farmer
who would produce for the market. So landowners came to regard their estates in
a new light: as a source of money profit, of profits that were elastic and
could be increased. Rents used to be fixed at levels maintained so long that
they came to be regarded as “customary,” as having existed “from time
immemorial”; so did the many extortionate legal charges which feudal landowners
extracted from the peasantry; but now they were being “racked up” to
fantastically high levels. This was in itself a moral as well as an economic
revolution, a break with all that men had held right and proper, and had the
most disturbing effects on ways of thought and belief.”

Hill paid considerable attention
to the radicals of the English revolution of groups such as the Levellers and
Diggers, and he was correct when he said that while these were the most
conscious revolutionaries, they were second in importance to Oliver Cromwell as
a revolutionary force. Again in this essay Hill would have appeared to have
revised his previous position on the Levellers.

Hill justified this revision
by saying that “Some will think that I overemphasise the importance of the
defeated radicals at the expense of the mainstream achievements of the English
revolution. Yet without the pressure of the Radicals, the civil war might not
have transformed into a revolution: some compromise could have been botched up
between the gentry on the two sides- a “Prussian path”. Regicide and Republic
were no part of the intensions of the original leaders of the Long Parliament:
they were forced on the men of 1649 by the logic of the revolution which they
were trying to control.”